End of Semester News Digest
The end of the spring semester has been jam-packed with events and international travel as our staff gear up for another exciting summer of research!
In May and early June, Southampton hosted four major workshops in ethics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy. At the beginning of May, Conor McHugh and Kurt Sylvan held a workshop entitled 'Attitudes and Agency: Epistemology'. The event served the dual function of kicking off a collaboration in epistemology with KU Leuven and a series of workshops on the nature of our control over our mental states. Ernest Sosa, one of the world's greatest living epistemologists, came from America to give the keynote lecture, and there were three other great talks by John Hyman (Oxford), Mona Simion (Leuven), and our own Kurt Sylvan.
Shortly after this event, Alex Gregory organized a workshop on the nature and significance of disability. This interdisciplinary workshop featured speakers from education, disability studies and philosophy, including Simo Vehmas (Helsinki), Lorella Terzi (Roehampton) and John Vorhaus (UCL Institute of Education), along with a closing talk by Alex.
About a week later, Daniel Whiting held a workshop entitled 'The Normative Significance of Normative Beliefs', which investigated whether and to what extent our obligations are determined by our beliefs about what obligations we have. Speakers at the event included Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (University of Michigan), Daniel Fogal (Uppsala), Paulina Sliwa (Cambridge), and the organizer himself.
Finally, David Woods just today hosted a workshop entitled 'Evil after Kant', which explored views about the nature of evil in 19th Century continental philosophy responding to Kant. Andrew Bowie (Royal Holloway), Martin Sticker (Göttingen), and Gudrun von Tevenar (Birkbeck) were the invited speakers, and our own Chris Janaway also spoke at the event.
In addition to these four events, our staff have been busy traveling to important international conferences and workshops to give talks in the last few weeks. Here are a few examples of this philosophical globetrotting:
* Alex Gregory recently returned from America, where he gave a talk at the St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality ('SLACRR'), one of the most important annual conferences in the philosophy of normativity.
* Lee Walters arrived in Southampton recently from Serbia, where he gave a talk on objectivity and conditionals at a major conference on conditionals in Belgrade.
* Kurt Sylvan has just gotten back from Sweden and Belgium. In Belgium, he gave the keynote lecture at the Cologne-Leuven Epistemology Meeting, and in Sweden he spoke at a conference on the language and metaphysics of normativity.
* Finally, Jonathan Way is soon returning from Leipzig, where he gave a headlining talk at an important workshop on the nature and norms of reasoning.
Congratulations to all!